September 1, 2016

Structural Review of NHMRC’s Grant Program: IRU Submission

The restructure of Australia’s health and medical research grants must retain the focus on supporting optimal research leading to the best possible health and medical outcomes for all Australians .

The individual submissions of IRU member universities provide a detailed assessment of NHMRC’s proposed three models.  While raising a number of interesting options, our conclusion is that a better model is needed such as the Griffith model four that is structured to achieve the desired health outcomes rather than the desired outcomes for medical research careers.

IRU supports the approach of restricting the number of grants held by Chief Investigators but argues that this is not yet suitable for Indigenous health research and that it creates issues for researchers from enabling disciplines.

Read the IRU submission downloadable here.

Read the IRU members’ submissions here: Griffith University, (model 4), Flinders University, La Trobe University and CDU.